A good question, and one I didn’t have a quick answer to. I did a little calculating, though, and discovered the answer: Not as long as you might think!

For starters: With few exceptions, these lunches are what my family had for dinner the night before. I make enough to feed my family plus five small people, so daycare lunches add little if any prep time.

(Does this mean that I’m eating the same meal twice, dinner on Monday and lunch on Tuesday and so on through the week? Well, it would if I did, but I can’t be eating two full-size dinners every day unless I want to be a somewhat more than full-sized woman! So I eat my largest meal with the daycare, and in the evening, I eat the vegetable course. A large salad, a plate of roasted beets, that sort of thing. I gather it’s healthier to eat your largest meal earlier in the day, so that’s what I’m doing.)

Secondly: In Mary’s house, Sunday is Food Day. That’s when I make the weekly menu and from it the weekly grocery list, which I hand off to Wonderful Husband to take to the store. I started doing weekly menu plans perhaps two years ago, and WHAT A WONDERFUL THING IT IS!!! You think you don’t have time? HA!

It helps me enormously to have the week’s menus worked out in advance. If I have to stand in front of my open fridge and stare down the contents at 5:30, trying to come up with a meal to place on the table at 6:30?

TOTALLY DEMORALIZING. I hates it, precious, yes I does.

That’s how I used to do it. I’d get to the end of the day, I’d send the daycare on their way, and then there I’d be, in front of my fridge, pacing the kitchen, opening and closing cupboard doors, and just generally turning into a panicky, fatigued, stressed-out, put-upon, resentful MESS. Feeding people! It NEVER ENDED!! My family kept wanting to EAT, dammit, meal after meal. So demanding. Relentless, they were. So there I’d be, evening after evening, staring into the fridge, willing something edible to leap out at me, fully formed.

UGH.

But! To brew myself a nice pot of tea, and sit down first thing Sunday morning, pencil and paper at the ready, with my recipe file of family favourites, a cookbook or two, and a couple of favourite food websites?

Soooo relaxing.

And at the end of every day? I don’t have to think. I don’t have to be creative. I just have to look at the list, and do it.

SO! MUCH! BETTER!

So. Anyway. The husband takes my grocery list and brings home the bacon bulgar. And often, wine too! In the afternoon, with all the lovely fresh food, I make most or all of the side dishes.

This week we had beets, coleslaw and green salad as sides, as well as pesto, which can keep quite a while in the fridge. Roasted beets (by far my favourite way to cook them) take time but no attention. (Wrap them in foil and roast at 350 for an hour or so. Lots of recipes suggest topping and tailing, or adding oil and/or balsamic vinegar. I don’t do any of that. Just bung ‘em in foil and ignore.) The coleslaw, pesto, and salad were made while the beets cooked. Pesto takes about 5 minutes to whizz together in a food processor, and salad is quick and easy — 15 minutes, maybe? The coleslaw was a little more finicky, even with a food processor and a mandoline, but even so, it didn’t take longer than the beets cooked to make all three. So, time on weekend, to make three side dishes: less than an hour, but we’ll call it an hour.

As for the rest of them… they varied from 10 minutes for pesto and pasta (since all I had to do was cook the pasta), 30 for rice and dahl, to about an hour for the stews (which breaks down to 20 minutes chopping/prep and 40 minutes simmering. In fact I probably simmered them longer than 40 minutes, but they could easily have been eaten after 20 minutes. If you have time, longer simmering makes them tastier, that’s all. You could use the long simmer time to clean the kitchen or organize your tax files.

Or you could put your feet up and enjoy a glass of wine. Aaaaah.

When do I prepare meals? Usually after hours. I’m trying to get into the habit of cooking real food with the tots, but this week I forgot. Silly of me: it would have been super-easy to make the pesto with them, for example, or to have them wash and wrap the beets. Oh, well. Next week!

I’d say my three ‘secrets’, which are not secrets at all, are

1. Double-duty meals: Family dinners are daycare lunches. (Cooking in bulk, in essence.)
2. Menu Planning!!!Cannot say enough about the stress-reducing virtues of menu planning.
3. Sunday side dish prep time (Some prep on the weekend, some on weeknights. Divide and conquer!).

And the occasional lunch of peanut butter sandwiches.

:-)

Add that all up and you get about 3 hours 40 minutes prep. Let’s round that up and call it four hours. For ten meals. (Five dinner, five lunches.)

That works out to … roughly 25 minutes/meal, and that’s with me rounding up in a couple of spots. Twenty-five minutes for home-cooked, nutritious, delicious, interesting food.

Some of you have wondered how I get the children to eat these things. Here’s the thing: I don’t. I don’t “get” the children to eat. I provide good, healthy, nourishing food. They can eat it, they can sit there and stare it down keep the rest of us company, or they can leave. This is not a punitive thing, unless they pitch a fit, in which case they go sit on the Quiet Stair until they stop. While the rest of us continue our meal.

It’s not punitive because, unless the child’s being truly obnoxious about it (or maybe if I’m particularly hormonal) it doesn’t annoy me. (Let me clarify here: it will annoy me if I’m particularly hormonal; it is exceptionally rare that I get punitive about it … because I don’t have to. Worse, because it’s counter-productive.)

So what do I do?

I’ve said this before, but really, there’s nothing much more to explain. I let them choose to go hungry. That’s it, that’s all. That is how I “get” kids to eat. I let it be their choice. When I let them make that choice, instead of coaxing, coercing, and (worst of all!) offering alternates, they learn that eating is better than not-eating. Eventually, they even learn that food of all sorts is good!

About

A childcare provider is expected to be a superhuman mix of the Madonna and Mary Poppins, ever patient, loving, kind, always delighting in the sweetness of her charges. I don’t do such a bad job, all in all, and it’s far more likely the parents than the children who strain my sanity most days. But I’m here to tell you: It’s Not ALL Mary Poppins…